What's in ANAME?

On Monday, May 23^rd 2011, I signed up for my first domain, thega.me.uk.

I promptly set up an email server, and my housemate at the time sent me my first email:

For a reason I cannot remember, Blacknight was my registrar of choice, and my domain registration was with them until earlier this month.

Why did I change from a service I had happily been using for over 15 years?

It’s GitHub’s fault.

GitHub Pages

If you work in tech, GitHub’s recent instability will probably have been an inconvenience to you at some point.

I have been using GitHub pages for a couple of years now, as a free service; so it seems hard to complain. That, and my personal blog is not the most critical site on the internet, so some downtime should not be a concern for me.

Except I have also been going through the free digital services I use and trying to move towards services which I can pay for. “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”.

For example, I moved my email from Gmail to Proton Mail a few years back. I also switched from using Google Photos to supporting Immich, a self-hosted photo solution.

I pay for Signal and avoid WhatsApp where ever possible.

Yes, I am that guy.

I do this partially to ease my conscience about getting to pay for and support diversity in the market, as I believe that we have too few giant companies dominate the tech space; which empowers platform decay¹.

So combining my desire to switch to an EU alternative, and GitHub’s shocking uptime, I had the push I needed to look at other options.

My requirements were:

1. Serves up a static site
2. Supports custom domain names (e.g. thega.me.uk)
3. Manages TLS certificates for the site

But the solution I found opened my eyes to some features I didn’t know I wanted.

statichost.eu

As the title says, statichost.eu was the provider I landed on. The pricing seemed reasonable, and it met my three criteria.

I was initially concerned that it was an abandoned project, as the social media and blog had not been updated in a while.

I emailed them and the owner replied saying that ’no it was not abandoned’ and that he had no intentions of shutting it down any time soon.

On top of my three requirements above, I was pleasantly surprised by three features in particular:

1. ‘Direct Upload’, which Zips up the generated site and pushes it to statichost.eu for deployment.
2. ‘Password Protection’, which puts a basic HTTP authorization on the deployed site.
3. Multiple sites under the same account.

Adding these three together, in a self-hosted Forgejo actions pipeline, I can deploy my site to demo.thega.me.uk for testing prior to pushing it live.

In the past I have been caught out by posts having a date in the future due to time zones, or a missing file that I forgot to add when committing.

This demo site will allow me to validate what will go live.

With GitHub Pages, this would have required a separate repository, and there would be no way of adding a password.

There was one small downside, in that statichost.eu required I set up an ANAME or an ALIAS record, to point the custom DNS names I have to the managed one for the service. A static IP address was given, but I confirmed with the owner that this is likely to change in the future if hosting shifts, so I should really use an ANAME record.

This was not a problem with statichost.eu — because ANAME records have been a thing for 5 years or so — but with my DNS provider Blacknight, who did not support them.

I want to point out that in every other way Blacknight have been great. Sure, they don’t support any modern features like Dynamic DNS, APIs (useful for Let’s Encrypt), ANAME records, or rule change validation, but they can serve one hell of an A record.

Mythic Beasts

So my quest to move away from GitHub pages, led me to have to find another Domain Registrar.

I asked my immediate friends group who they used and if they had any recommendations.

Porkbun — a registrar which comes highly recommended online as well — came up, but is based in the US; so I ruled it out.

Then, Mythic Beasts was suggested, as they were a sponsor at a festival I go to. A very nerdy festival, for immensely nerdy people.

After checking out their site, I was pleasantly surprised to confirm they:

1. Were based in the UK.
2. Supported ANAME records.
3. Had an API (which was a nice optional extra).

I know it’s dumb, but they also have an RSS feed, which makes them very cool people.

Switching my .com domains was easy and fully automated, however I needed to raise a support ticket with Blacknight to get my .uk domains transferred.

Forgejo

I have been pulling my hair out over this last decision, but I have removed the source code for this blog from GitHub.

I know, I know, once open source, always open source. However, I am very confident that no-one was using the source code of these blogs, and if they were, it was probably to train an AI.

Part of me felt uncomfortable just having my photos on GitHub. They are licenced correctly, and stealing them from this site wouldn’t be a massive effort, but I want their only access to be from a page that has the licence at the bottom.

Because of this I moved to a self-hosted Forgejo instance, with the code being replicated to a private GitLab repository.

Switching from GitHub actions to Forgejo actions was trivial, as Forgejo implements most of the GitHub actions workflow YAML API.

This would have not been possible if I had not moved to a third party site hosting solution, as GitHub Pages and GitHub itself are pretty intertwined.

Blowfish

I have also been quietly migrating this blog away from my theme provider, Blowfish.

Blowfish allowed me to get up and running quickly with something quite professional, however I have been cursed with the desire to meddle with the design of my site. As such, over the last month I have been, bit by bit, replacing the theme with my own.

For now, it looks identical, but that will change over time.

So far I have:

1. Reimplemented the HTML templates, CSS, JS in my own theme.
2. Stripped all complexity added by features I don’t use.
3. Moved everything except the formatting of the main body of text away from Tailwind, to ‘raw’ CSS.
4. Centred the captions on images.

This has meant that articles like this one no longer have ‘related’ articles at the bottom, and the site no-longer has a search function. I might add these again in the future.

Blowfish is still a great first time theme, so I recommend it still, however I suspect I might have outgrown it.

Fin

So now, having changed pretty much everything that powers this blog, I am happy to say that this blog is built on a self-hosted Forgejo instance, hosted on statichost.eu, with all DNS registered at Mythic Beasts.

Now, to endlessly fiddle with the theme on this blog.